In early 2014 Adobe announced a new type of ebook DRM which had the dual properties of being unbreakable as well as incompatible with existing ebook readers and apps. After initially planning to force everyone to switch to the new DRM in less than six months (which would leave millions of ereader owners in the lurch), Adobe backed down and largely dropped the issue.

But what they didn’t do was kill the new DRM. It still exists, and now I am getting reports that it has been showing up in the wild.

Over the past few months I have been receiving suggestions that I should be pointing users to older versions of Adobe DE because ebooks downloaded with the later versions might come wrapped in a new type of DRM.

I hadn’t been able to confirm the reports until this week, but it turns out that they were true.

A reader has tipped me to a comment over on the Apprentice Alf blog from a user who is unable to strip the DRM from a PDF he bought. The book in question is a Spanish-language genetic algorithm textbook, and even though it opens correctly in Adobe DE 4.5 on Windows 10 it still kept defeating Apprentice Alf’s DRM-striping tools.

After confirming that the PDF would not open in Adobe DE 2.0.1, the user was told that:

Sounds like you probably have the newer DRM that hasn’t been figured out yet. And the tools can’t remove it. In the future, stick with ADE 2.0.1.

And so this user has an ebook which they can’t protect by removing the DRM – for now.

Now that the DRM has been spotted in the wild, it won’t be long before someone turns their attention to bypassing it and then sharing their work. Until then, your best best for avoiding the DRM is to stick to the major ebookstores.

The new DRM is rare because it is most likely only being used by the less popular ebook retailers which don’t realize how they’re harming their customers.

Google and Kobo, on the other hand, both know they have to support existing devices and apps, and so they avoid the new DRM like the plague. I would be stunned to find the new DRM in either store.

So to keep your ebooks safe, stick to the more popular ebookstores, and be sure to avoid the latest versions of Adobe DE.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Thanks, Purple lady!

image by rabanito

When I reviewed the Kindle Oasis on Saturday, one of my complaints was that the much ballyhooed battery died in only three days. At the time I had written that off to the Oasis not living up to Amazon’s marketing claims, but now I wonder if there was a more specific cause.

There’s a new discussion over on MobileRead where one Oasis owner reports that their new ereader wasn’t charging correctly:

Why did my Oasis shut itself down when there was plenty of battery charge left at the cover? I started with both batteries at the Kindle and the cover fully charged at 100%. I started reading at light level 24 (maximum brightness) for 6 straight hours, WIFI off. At the end of 6 hours, I started to get low battery warning message before the device shut itself down. Before it shut down, I looked at the battery meter and it showed that the battery at the Kindle was at 10% while at the cover was still at 44%. Then the battery at the Kindle went down to 5% and then downed to 1% before it finally shut down while the battery at the cover only went down a bit further.

This mechanism made no sense. When the Kindle and the cover are connected, shouldn’t it use the battery at the cover first before draining the battery at the Kindle? And why shut it down when there was still 44% battery charge at the cover? Why can’t it draw current from whatever part of the unit still has battery charge?

I didn’t think to check my Oasis when the battery ran down, so I can’t tell you whether but this would tend to explain why the battery on my unit died so quickly.

Here’s my theory.

The Oasis connects to its battery case through a 5-pin port.  A power connection would only require two pins, which tells us that it’s a smart connection of some kind.

What if the Oasis isn’t drawing from the battery case because it thinks the battery case isn’t connected? There are five pins; what if they’re not seating correctly?

That’s not as big of a stretch as it sounds. I for one fidget when I read, and I repeatedly caught myself removing the cover and snapping it back on.

I also noticed that it was possible for the magnets to hold the cover on even when the Oasis wasn’t seated correctly, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the reports about battery life had that obvious cause.

What do you think? Have you witnessed any strange battery behavior with the Oasis?

There’s a story going around today which reminds us why one should always understand the limitations of a set of statistics before one repeats them in a news article.

The Telegraph took a look at the UK Publisher Association’s annual stats for 2015 and used them as the basis for recycling that old trope about ebooks not killing paper books after all.

For years, book-lovers have been lamenting the inevitable demise of the printed book in the face of competition from a digital behemoth.

But reports of the death of the traditional book have been greatly exaggerated, according to the definitive annual survey of the industry. The Publishers Association study has revealed that sales of print books are rising, while digital sales are down for the first time since the invention of the e-reader.

Experts have hailed the figures, saying the claim that the "physical book is doomed" can "finally be refuted".

Stephen Lotinga, chief executive of The Publishers Association, said: "Those who made predictions about the death of the book may have underestimated just how much people love paper."

This year’s annual report shows physical book sales up to £2.76 billion in 2015 from £2.748 billion in 2014. Digital sales dropped from £563m to £554m, the first year-on-year fall since 2011 when PA started measuring e-book sales.

The change has been attributed to readers realising the pleasure to be taken in a physical book, as well as a host of lifestyle non-fiction, which does not translate as well onto digital.

The problem with this piece is that The Telegraph is working from a data set that does not include the entirety of the UK market.

Rather than saying that UK ebook sales fell, a more accurate report would be that publishers ebook revenues fell last year in the UK.

Like the NYTimes last fall, The Telegraph has misinterpreted data collected by a trade group and assumed that it represented the entire market. Last year the NYTimes was reading too much into figures from the American Association of publishers, but this year The Telegraph incorrectly assumed that the UK Publishers Association’s annual yearbook reflected the entire UK market.

As the UK Publishers Association explained when I followed up, this is simply not true:

The figures related to publisher invoiced sales, grossed up from the PA sales monitor which represents 75% of UK publishing industry turnover (both members and non –members ) and involves both publishers and distributors.

The PA’s data is even less than complete when it comes to ebook sales. Remember, the Author Earnings report showed that 30% of the ebook sales in the UK Kindle Store went to indie authors, and another 15% went to Amazon.

This means that 45% or more of the ebooks sold in the UK’s dominant ebook store do not show up in the PA’s annual stats. And the figure is probably worse than that given that the PA has said that their data is not complete.

Furthermore, The Telegraph’s report offers a misleading take on even what limited data the PA can provide. According to The Bookseller, the PA’s stats showed that overall digital revenues rose last year:

But digital revenues were a mixed bag. There was plenty of growth: the overall figure for digital books and electronic journal subscriptions was very healthy, with a 3% rise year on year, to £1.3bn. Schools showed they were continuing to make a digital shift, with figures up 23% from a small base to £16m. In English-Language Training (ELT), digital book sales were up 35% (to £15m), and in academic and professional books the rise was 4%, to £262m.

So it’s not nearly as simple as proclaiming that ebook sales fell, or even announcing that publisher ebook sales fell (the more accurate title).

And while we’re on the topic of ebook sales in the UK, it’s also worth noting that there is conflicting data. Last November Nielsen reported that ebook sales rose 5% in the UK in 2015.

Nielsen’s data is based on consumer surveys, and so they are not completely reliable either, but the fact that they disagree with the PA’s annual stats suggests that we should trust neither, and most definitely avoid reporting either statistic as a fact.

The Telegraph has already made that mistake, unfortunately, but hopefully will avoid repeating it.

image by David Holt London

There’s a story going around for the past couple weeks about the IDPF and the W3C, and a proposed merger between the two groups. One manages web standards, and the other is responsible for screwing up ebook standards like Epub3. Since one is a closely related subset of the other, someone had the bright idea that the two groups should consider merging.

If you ask me, this will come off about as well as the PennCentral, but not everyone is as realistic.

Tim Berners-Lee was quoted in Book Business Magazine yesterday , and he discussed a few of the benefits he saw in the potential merger. I sincerely hope that his words are taken out of context or misquoted, because they are a mix of the ignorant and the abhorrent.

To start with, someone doesn’t understand that the real problem with ebooks is DRM (something the IDPF does not address), and not ebook standards.

Permanence. In a world of where ebook and web technology converge, ebooks will no longer disappear when new devices and formats emerge. They will live on because they are written in what Berners-Lee described as “the simplest coding language,” HTML 5. This is the foundation on which all web content is built, and Berners-Lee anticipates it will soon be the coding language on which all digital content is created.

DRM is why ebooks vanish, not minor technical issues like format compatibility. We know how to break open just about any ebook format and turn it into another; in most cases calibre can even do it for you.

But there’s a stumbling block which stops us from converting ebooks, and that is the DMCA. It is illegal to strip DRM, and that is the real problem – again, a problem which the IDPF can’t address.

And sadly, with the W3C willing to consider screwing up the web by making DRM a core element of web standards, I don’t think they’re either able to see or admit that DRM is the enemy, not formats.

Seamless. Because ebook content of the future will be created in HTML 5, it will seamlessly transition across different platforms as well as different content types. “Even though it creates some trouble [to make content interoperable], the trouble is worth it,” said Berners-Lee.

Again, the problem isn’t format; ebooks have been standardized on one form or another of HTML/XHTML/XML since the turn of the millennium.

Edit: And just so we’re on the same page, DRM is not a problem which the IDPF can address. It’s outside their control, so when Berners-Lee discusses how a merger can fix problems caused by DRM he demonstrates that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

The one thing stopping us from seamlessly transitioning content across different platforms is DRM, not format.

But I have serious doubts that Berners-Lee grasps that problem, because the article implies that he is for more DRM, not less.

Only now they’re calling it tracking, rather than what it really is: spying.

Trackable. Along with interlinking, content should be trackable, said Berners-Lee. Publishers must have the ability to understand how books are being read and shared. “We should live in a world of linked data,” he said.

This is spying, yes, but the other problem is that any platform capable of this level of tracking is only half a step away from denying you access to the content when the tracking data isn’t being sent, or simply on a publisher’s whim.

Yes, I am going a step beyond what he said, but my extrapolation is an example of why we should fight that type of thinking. If publishers are allowed to go down that road, users will get screwed. We have already seen that situation crop up with video and apps, so it’s not like it’s a stretch of the imagination.

Folks, I think we should give Berners-Lee the benefit of the doubt and assume that his statements are somehow garbled or miscommunicated, because if this is really what he really thinks then we have someone who could actually screw things up worse than the IDPF.

I did not think that was possible.

image by Paul Clarke, via

When Amazon launched Voiceview for Kindle on Tuesday, they announced  it with a $140 Kindle Paperwhite bundle and the promise that the feature would be coming to other Kindle models eventually.

That day has arrived.

My loaner review unit arrived on Thursday morning, and the first thing I did after taking a few unboxing photos was to plug the Kindle audio adapter into my Kindle Oasis (also a loaned review unit).

Voiceview for Kindle started working on my Oasis as soon as I plugged in the adapter into the Oasis’s USB port. The Kindle started reading the menus to me aloud (via earbuds) and explained how to use the new feature.

This feature also works on the Kindle Voyage, although some additional steps are required.

Also, you will need to supply your own headphones, earbuds, etc. They’re not included.

It is designed to be used by anyone who can touch but not see the screen. Simply move your finger around the screen, and the Kindle will tell you what is under your finger. (Amazon explains the options in detail on its site.)

You can double tap to select a menu item, or use one of a limited number of gestures, and you can disable Voiceview for Kindle simply by unplugging the audio adapter from your Kindle.

You can also disable the feature by removing the Kindle Oasis cover (I found this out the hard way).

Edit: You can find the Voiceview settings menu through the "quick actions" menu. It’s the sun/gear symbol on the menu bar. According to my tip at MobileRead:

In VoiceView settings you can toggle VoiceView On and Off, engage a Tutorial, adjust Reading Speed (from .66x to 4x with 8 intermediate speeds), and Volume (from 1 to 8, default is 4).

Voiceview for Kindle works with the dictionary, Wikipedia, and translation feature (although they are rather hard to navigate). It does not work with the Kindle’s web browser, Kindle Freetime, or audiobooks, and there’s no obvious option for changing the voice’s speed.

But it is simple to use and the hardware is equally simple.

I now have two reports which confirm that the Kindle audio adapter is a generic USB to audio converter which works with any headphones, earbuds, or speakers. Amazon charges $20 for it, but you can put together your own unit for less than ten dollars on Ebay.

Seriously:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRGwIMHDVqw

The only limitation is that the voice is currently limited to English, and you might need to install the voice file.

The Kindle Voyage, for example, does not have the voice. Also, at least one 7th-gen Kindle Paperwhite in Germany does not have the voice (probably because the Voiceview for Kindle has not officially launched in Germany). But it does have the software, and you can download the voices separately (from this page on Amazon.com).

All in all, Voiceview for Kindle still needs some work. It’s not as intuitive as it could be, but I still feel Amazon has managed to over-deliver a feature which is not available on any other current ereader.

Last July I broke the news that Audible was beta-testing a program where listeners could share an audiobook in their library with a friend, more or less giving away a copy at Audible’s expense.

That program, Audible Onebook, is now open to all Audible customers.

Audible announced on Wednesday that they’ve launched a new program where Audible customers can share an audiobook in their library with a friend. Strangely enough, this program is not named in the press release, but it sounds like the one I reported on last year:

Audible today announced the release of a new feature that allows listeners to give any audiobook they own in their “My Library” to others instantly via e-mail, text, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, using their iOS, Android, and Windows 10 devices. Each recipient gets his or her first title through the program for free, and Audible will pay authors, actors, and other rights holders the equivalent value of each recipient’s first title.

That’s a nifty (albeit a little expensive) way for Audible to build up their customer base, and I’m glad to see that Audible got the bugs out of the program.

It is still limited to the US, however.

“Audible’s many millions of habitués know how our audio service can enhance the quality and character of daily life – whether driving, exercising, or working around the house.  Audible is growing at historic rates as powerful words matched by powerful performances redefine reading and listening,” said Audible founder and CEO Donald Katz. “Audible customers also understand that they own each title they buy as members or a la carte purchasers, and they can carry their Audible libraries around forever. Now, for the first time, our listeners can send complete titles to anyone in the US and the cost is on us.”

image by BarnImages.com

Amazon’s greatest secret strength is its affiliate program. It gives web publishers a financial incentive to push customers to shop at Amazon, and this in turn has lead to a whole cottage industry of sites which find and promote Kindle ebook deals.

Now Amazon’s latest policy enforcement action is casting a shadow on the future of that industry.

Author Carmen Webster Buxton has tipped me a recent announcement from The Fussy Librarian, one of the many ebook newsletter services. Yesterday Fussy Librarian sent out an email to authors and publishers who had advertised in the newsletter, telling them that TFL was losing its affiliate account at Amazon:

It’s the email that no one in email marketing wants to receive:

“Your Associates account has come up for review in connection with our ongoing monitoring of the Amazon Associates Program. During our review, we have determined that you are not in compliance with the Operating Agreement that governs your participation in the Associates Program.”

Participation Requirement Number 6 prohibits the inclusion of Amazon Associate ID tags in any “offline manner,” including email. (In the URL, it’s the part at the end that says "tag=thefuslib0e-20.") In other words, it’s okay to get a commission if someone clicks on a link on your website, but not okay if someone clicks on that link in an email. Yeah, I don’t get it either, but it’s Amazon’s program, and they get to make their own rules. It’s been in the rules forever, too — just not enforced. Until now.

The email goes on to predict that this new enforcement will soon be applied to other email newsletters like BookBub and eReaderIQ.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

Update: Nope. I was wrong. Amazon has since gone after eReaderIQ and Pixel of Ink. eReaderIQ has lost its affiliate account, and Pixels of Ink has shut down.

While I can confirm that the rules do forbid using affiliate links in emails, I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to the conclusion that the sky is falling.

Yes, the news media is in the habit of responding to a single report by running around screaming like Chicken Little, but as we have seen in the past Amazon (for reasons we don’t understand) sometimes enforces a policy against a single party while leaving others untouched.

For example, in 2011 Amazon cut off an ebook sharing site, Lendle, for some unknown ToS violation. And then in 2012 the note-taking service Findings stopped supporting Kindle notes and highlights, ostensibly following a complaint from a publisher.

The relevant details from those stories is that Amazon only took action against a single site. Sites like Techdirt jumped to the conclusion that publishers were evil, but the fact is Amazon did not engage in a sweeping enforcement of their policies. And that is the current situation with the Kindle email newsletters.

I have checked, and eReaderIQ is still using Amazon affiliate links in its emails. I have also reached out to BookBub and asked whether they have received a similar notice.

They have not responded, and between that and the lack of discussion on KBoards and Absolute Write I can only conclude that we don’t have enough info to tell what is going on.

Stay tuned. I will post BookBub’s response when I receive it.

image by Skley

After years of forbidding sites from putting Adsense ads on interstitial pages and penalizing sites for app install ads, guess what Google just did?

The ad network giant has launched a new interstitial ad unit for mobile sites.

I was browsing my admin pages in Adsense today when a banner ad informed me that Google is testing two new mobile ad units. One is a small persistent ad that clings to the bottom of the screen, while the other is an interstitial ad (it appears after you click a link on a site to visit another page on the same site).

The ads will only show up on some mobile devices; the Silk browser on my Kindle Fire isn’t supported. The new ads are also opt-in, and require that the web publisher add code to their site. But when they do show up, the interstitial ad will look something like this when viewed from a smartphone:

So much for insisting on a good user experience.

This type of ad is one of the more annoying parts of the mobile experience, which is why (for as long as I have used Adsense) Google has discouraged web publishers from putting Adsense ads on interstitial pages.  In fact, Google’s own beginner’s guide to Adsense specifically mentions this type of ad and tells you not to do it.

But now Google has ignored its own instructions, proving once and for all that even in a company which used to have the motto "Don’t be evil", money is still ultimately the boss.

Google flipflopped on this issue because one, Google gets most of its revenue from selling ads, and two, they ran out of places to put those ads.

If Google wants to keep analysts and stockholders happy, it has to keep revenues up, and that means finding new places to annoy you with ads.

This is why Google shows ads as the first and sometimes second search result (and to the right of search results), why Google started inserting similar ads in Google Play, and why they now have a couple new mobile ad units (like the one at right).

Does anyone want to guess where Google will find the next spot to insert more ads?

I would bet that Google will find a way to monetize its matched content ad unit by inserting links to advertisers. This unit isn’t technically an advert – right now. Instead it currently recommends articles on whichever site it’s on. It’s really a "related posts" unit, but if Google replaced some of the recommendations with  articles from other sites then Google will be able to sell the links as adverts.

Edit: And apparently Google is already selling those links as adverts. Artem R of Android Police pointed out that the FAQ for this ad unit mentions an "allow ads" option. I can’t enable that option, which means it’s in a limited beta test.

For reference, Taboola and OutBrain have similar ad units. (You can find an example on Liliputing, if you like.) I have tried a couple and found them to be unproductive, but it’s pretty clear that Google disagrees.

For some writers, stringing words together to tell a story is the easy part. The words just flow in a pattern that creates itself, leaving us as little more than stenographers taking notation in the form of a first draft as the words move through our heads.

For some of those same writers the hard part about writing is thinking up names to use in the draft or to hang on it. I am one of those writers; my blog was first called"Nate’s eBook News" and then "The Digital Reader" because I honestly couldn’t come up with a better name for it when I launched the blog in 2010.

I used to think that I just didn’t have that type of creativity in me, but lately I have realized that this is less an innate ability than a skill which one can learn and develop. I stumbled across that insight by accident, and I would like to share it with you.

One simple trick for coming up with names

The tl;dr version is that I found a way to apply the "porn star name" parlor game as a general trick for coming up with names for just about anything.

For those who haven’t heard of it before, this is a game where you invent the name you would use as a porn star by combining the name of your first pet and the street of your childhood home.

First introduced to the public in the movie Boogie Nights, the game is frivolous, silly, and fun, but when we look past the silliness it’s clear that the game follows an obvious pattern which can be applied to naming just about anything.

I identified the pattern one Saturday night when I was cracking jokes on Twitter. I was coming up with alternative versions of the porn star name game as it applied to other topics.

For example:

How to name a fictional law firm: Pick two or three of the schools you attended.

Pinckney Cannon White

— (@thDigitalReader) May 8, 2016

Those are a couple pretty funny ideas, yes, but if we look past the humor we can see a pattern in both the original game and and my alternate suggestions.

All three games boil down to a simple process: take elements from your life and string the words together to come up with names.

You can use anything, including:

• address (past and current, including both the number, street name, and location)
• pets (deceased, living)
• friends
• enemies
• schools
• food
• colors
• relatives
• teachers
• personal attributes
• current mood

You should probably take care when using a distinctive or unique name, especially if you want to stay on good terms with the source of that name, but if that source is an enemy – have fun.

Once you understand the basic premise, you can also expand the list of possible options to include:

• emotions
• random adjective and adverbs (including from foreign languages)
• winning Scrabble words
• historical events
• output from lorem ipsum generators

This trick can be used to name just about anything, including people, places, and companies in a story; the title of your great American novel; a publishing company; or even your next pet. (The law firm name trick mentioned above really does work for law firms, accounting firms, and auditors.)

Just be sure that when you use it you also carefully consider the context, connotation, subtext, and cultural references in the names you invent. Sometimes this will prevent you from using a name, but other times it will add extra layers of meaning which you can use to add to a story.

A place name might be used as a reference to a future event, making it a clue for the observant reader. It could also be a reference to an old story in a previous book in the series, or an inside joke.

And when making a name for a character, you need to consider how the name would be structured in that person’s culture. Does the family name come first? Is there a masculine or feminine patronymic? Is this an aristocrat?

For example, the name Aral Vorkosigan combines the name of the sea with the Russian word for thief and a corruption of the last name of a former Premier of the Soviet Union. The character is an aristocrat (denoted by the "Vor" syllable) in a Russian-influenced human culture, and the details built into his name add depth to the story in ways that only the most astute reader would notice. (I’ve been waiting to use that factoid for close to a decade.)

The possible complications are endlessly fascinating, but also infinitely fruitful. The only real limitation is how many times you want to generate new names, and how much work you want to put into refining a name.

So, how would you use this trick?

images by photosteve101, andrechinn,  kimubert, tarotastic

There was a time when US publishers owned their own bookstores (DoubleDay even had a chain of stores), but that ended decades ago as the stores were sold off or shuttered. Now Penguin Random House may be signalling a return to what is a common practice is Europe.

Last week the publisher officially opened a new bookstore in Carolina, a suburb of the capital of Puerto Rico. Launched in partnership with local bookseller The Bookmark, the new store has around 1,000 square feet of retail space and carries a unique selection of more than 1,000 PRH titles in both Spanish and English. There’s a children’s book section, as well as coloring books and YA titles including graphic novels.

“For us, this is an excellent initiative to continue our growth. In addition, we will increase the supply of books in the Puerto Rican market, which still has a healthy demand for a community of readers since the closing of the Borders stores,” said Juan Peña, VP of sales and marketing, JR Blue Label Management, parent company of The Bookmark.

JR Blue Label is a book wholesaler based in Puerto Rico.

The store will be run by The Bookmark, and during the first three months it will be heavily promoted by PRH through a pr campaign, an aggressive author event calendar and "innovative technology designed to help readers discover new books and authors".

Over the next few months the store will also host events featuring Penguin Random House authors, including high-profile writers Claudia Gray and Lauren Kate, as well as story time appearances by children’s characters like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.

“This is the first time we are working so robustly on a store like this, in a mall setting or any other setting at retail,” said PRH SVP, Director of International Sales and Marketing Cyrus Kheradi. “This is really a first for us.”

Well, no, it really isn’t. PRH owns DoubleDay, which used to have a chain of 39 bookstores before selling them to B&N in 1990. But even so, that slip just goes to show how distant and disconnected PRH has grown from retailing; it doesn’t even remember when one of its imprints used to own bookstores.

Publishers in other countries would not make that mistake. Sweden’s Bonnier, for example, owns the PocketShop chain of airport bookstores. Germany’s Weltbild is both a book publisher and media retailer in Germany, and Italian publishers Mondadori and Giunti Editore each own a chain of bookstores.

The practice is not unknown in Japan, Brazil, and other countries; it’s only in the US that a publisher owning a bookstore chain is the exception (Deseret Book) and not the rule.

So do you think this Penguin Random House news is the beginning of a trend?

I would like to think so (I’m feeling optimistic today). What the major publishers don’t know about retail could fill a book, and one of the better ways for publishers to correct that oversight would be to run their own bookstores.

And hey, it’s rarely a bad idea to copy Amazon.  That online retailer launched its first bookstore last fall just so it could learn more about how consumers browse for books in physical bookstores. That type of behavior would be useful to publishers, and not just Amazon.

image, story via News is my Business

For the past couple months Amazon has enabled authors and publishers to give away ebooks as contest prizes via Amazon.com – so long as the ebooks were paid for. Now Amazon is offering authors a better option.

On Tuesday Goodreads announced a new Kindle ebook giveaway program.

The author or publisher of a book – whoever controls the digital distribution rights to the book – can now offer up to 100 copies of the Kindle ebook in a giveaway. The author or publisher chooses how long the giveaway will run, and Goodreads does the rest. At the end of the giveaway, Goodreads randomly chooses winners and automatically sends the Kindle ebooks to their preferred devices and Cloud accounts. Winners receive real Kindle ebooks, complete with all the great features and security that Amazon’s Kindle platform provides.

Authors can choose to run a contest before a book is published (it just has to be uploaded into the Kindle Store), and they can limit the number of copies in the contest (I see contests with only 50 copies available).

Giving away those (up to) 100 ebook copies costs a flat $119 per contest. And while we’re on the topic, listing a print book for a free giveaway, however, will continue to be free – but you still have to mail the print book yourself.

The program is launching in beta with 8 titles, all of which are published by Amazon, and it is currently limited to only Goodreads members in the US (this restriction apparently applies to both the contest entrants and the authors running the contest).

All in all, this program has many positive attributes, but not all are pleased:

"The $119 fee is ridiculous and is punishing people (indie authors, particularly) for not having hard copy books," writes one author. "Amazon allows you to do free giveaways which is why so many people use it. I was excited to see that this service would be available, but saw in the end that you intended to exploit indie authors the way everyone does (including Amazon). But thanks for saving us the "cost and hassle." Between the high prices for Goodread ads and this new 'service,' how is any independent writer supposed to get ahead in the world? Thanks…but no thanks."

Do you think he has a point?

Considering that this program merely adds another option without depriving authors of the chance to give away their ebooks in the Kindle Store or elsewhere, I don’t see the problem.

What do you think of this program?

When Simon & Schuster revived the Star Trek: Strange New World Writing Contest last October, I was dismayed to learn that S&S was letting its vanity press business partner, Author Solutions, run the contest.

This gave the impression that S&S was less interested in recruiting new authors to publish than in finding new victims for Author Solutions' high-pressure sales tactics, and that impression was reinforced last month by the form email sent to contest participants.

Everyone who signed up for the contest received the following email:

Thank you for your recent submission in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Writing Contest. We were honored to consider your short story. We received many imaginative tales that took us on different journeys through the Star Trek universe. After diligently considering each and every entry, we have selected the winners. Unfortunately, your submission was not included in the final group of stories.

If you enjoy writing, Archway Publishing can still help you share your personal or other sci-fi stories as a published book. And because you participated in this contest, you can save 20% on select packages.*

Authors would be wise not to take Archway up on its offer; they will regret it.

While Archway might look like a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster, it is actually a front company for Author Solutions (ASI), a disreputable vanity press.

Far from being "committed to helping authors self-publish their stories with ease", ASI is out to exploit authors rather than help them sell books.

It may boast 200,000 authors to date on its website, but neutral data sources show that ASI authors collectively sell around 600 copies a day (both print and digital) on the world’s biggest bookstore, Amazon.com, and generate retail sales worth around $8,000 per day.

So where does the money come from, you ask?

ASI gets most of its revenue from charging authors ridiculously expensive marketing fees and overcharging for publishing services (which are then filled by low bid contract recruited via Craigslist). It uses high-pressure sales tactics to sell authors worthless marketing services.

Many of ASI’s authors report experiences like this:

It seemed that Authorhouse would have been so helpful in helping me to get my book of the ground, that I accepted their offer. The manuscript has been prepared for printing by a USA company. Now I discovered that towards the end of every month Authorhouse phone me with an offer that I can not refuse. All these offers have made me 16,000 British pounds poorer, since I have been dealing with them and I have still not seen a statement of sales. Nor have I seen my own book so far. Someone has uploaded a photo on my facebook with my book in their hands. In January 2016 I have paid for my personal copies to the UK branch, which would have been sent to Spain. On the 21 of April I received a notification from the Spanish custom and excise office that duty is due on that delivery because it comes from the USA.

The book was displayed by them on the London book fair. I can’t modify my own web site which was set up by them. In desperation I tried changing company and came across LULU. Now I see that LULU is no better than Authorhouse is.

ASI operates under many imprints, including AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Archway, Nook Press, Partridge, MeGustaEscribir, Book Country, Westbow, Trafford, XLibris, and Balboa Press.

Like Archway, some of those imprints appear to be owned by an independent companies, but they are actually front companies for ASI and are run by that vanity press. ASI partners include Barnes & Noble, Lulu, Penguin Random House Spain, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hay House, Penguin India, Penguin Singapore, and Penguin Africa.

Author Solutions is a scam from beginning to end, and authors would be wise to avoid it. There are cheaper ways to get published, and there are many honest and trustworthy companies in this industry who can help get an author’s book published without taking the author for everything they got.

image by frankieleon

Guangzhou OED got its start in developing a knockoff epaper screen tech which rivaled E-ink, but now this Chinese company says they have developed a new graphene backplane which (if the marketing materials are to be believed) promises to be lighter and stronger than E-ink’s existing glass-based screens.

Unfortunately, the tech is arriving far too late for it to show up in ereaders.

From Xinhua:

The new material has been heralded as "the world’s first graphene electronic paper," by Chen Yu, general manager of Guangzhou OED Technologies, which developed it in partnership with a company in Chongqing.

Graphene is the world’s strongest and lightest known material; a single layer of graphene is only 0.335 nanometers thick, and it can conduct heat and electricity. The material can be used to create hard or flexible graphene displays, used in electronic products such as e-readers and wearable smart devices.

Compared with traditional e-papers, graphene e-paper is more pliable and has more intensity and its high-light transmittance means optical displays will be much brighter.

In addition, graphene is derived from carbon, meaning production costs will be much lower than for traditional e-papers, which use the rare, expensive metal indium. E-papers have been produced on a commercial scale since 2014. Compared with liquid crystal displays, e-papers are thinner, bendable and energy efficient, meaning products are more portable.

You can go ahead and ignore that last paragraph about costs; it is at best only half true and is highly misleading.

And you should also discount the optimistic bubbling on Gizmodo, Teleread, and other sites about this tech showing up in ereaders; that is highly unlikely.

The simple fact is the ereader market has reach the saturation point. Everyone who wants an ereader already has one, which is why the market has declined from its peak in 2012.

The first production run is always the most expensive, and there simply aren’t enough ereader sales each year to justify the capital investment required to develop a new screen tech into a commercial ereader product. (The market is down so much that no one is putting the plastic-backed Mobius E-ink screens in 6″ ereaders, either.)

Also, Amazon has driven the price of an ereader low enough that margins are too thin to support the development costs of a new screen, so if this tech does reach the market it will be a different market – signage, probably.

Remember, E-ink bought Sipix in 2012 and then used that company’s tech to develop 3-color shelf labels. That tech never made its way into ereader screens, and Guangzhou OED’s new graphene epaper will likely follow the same path.

image by UCL